Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Available Summary:

"An all-girl rock band moves to Hollywood in the hopes of achieving success, only to be lured by an eccentric music producer and his entourage into a whirlpool of wickedness and decadence." -IMDb.

Jack's Summary:

Before I even discuss this film's awful depiction of a trans man, let's get one thing straight... This is a bloody awful movie. It's badly written, badly acted, and badly directed. It's absolutely shit. It's apparently intended to be satire, but its ideas amount to little more than chucking spaghetti at the wall to see what, if anything, sticks. Very little does but, thankfully for the filmmakers, even the worst films can be immortalised as cult classics.

In this Roger Ebert Film Festival article, retrieved using the Wayback Machine, film co-writer Roger Ebert discusses the movie and admits that director and co-writer Ross Meyer "wanted everything in the screenplay except the kitchen sink," intending the movie to "simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick, and a moralistic exposé". This indulgent, overly ambitious goal confused the actors, who asked Ebert for clarification on whether their dialogue was supposed to be humorous or serious, but would not "risk offending" Meyer by daring to ask the film's director such a question. "The movie's story was made up as we went along," Ebert revealed, explaining that the movie's demonising, fetishised depiction of a trans man was also a "spur of the moment" choice, made without consideration of the harms such a character may cause.

Ronnie Barzell, nicknamed Z-Man, is established as the catalyst for the ruination of everyone else's lives. Think Rocky Horror Picture Show, but crap. The protagonists (three female rockstars and their manager) attend his party and find that the course of their lives are changed.

Though initially eloquent and eccentric, a source of entertainment rather than a threat, Barzell is eventually revealed to be the ultimate evil in the film, seemingly turned into the villain because the filmmakers were not organised enough to develop better ideas. He is perverted. He is obscene. He repeatedly sexually assaults, harasses, and ultimately kills a heterosexual man who refuses his advances. His sexual aggression and physical violence is inextricably tied to his gender non-conformity, and all of his crimes are committed while he is suddenly determined to force everybody to call him Superwoman at a party... As though, in the filmmakers' minds, the eleventh hour brought upon him a feverish need to be seen as a female, despite his complete comfort being socially known as a male throughout the rest of the film.

His coming out scene, if you want to call it that, embodies the classic trope of a perverted trans character undressing (partly or completely), shocking other characters with the knowledge that they've been deceived by a horrid, freakish imposter. He exposes and strokes his breasts, prompting his victim to laugh and scream, "You've been a broad all along, right Barzell? A goddamn broad! A goddamn ugly broad, Barzell! An ugly broad!"

Ebert, happily revealing that anti-FTM transphobia was baked into the very foundations of this movie, describes Barzell as an antagonist who "seems to be a gay man for most of the movie, but is finally revealed to be a woman in drag". Everyone in Barzell's life knows him as a man, talks about him as a man, and considers him a fixture in the entertainment industry. By all accounts, Barzell was completely socially transitioned and very successful, and evidently medically transitioned as well. The end of the film, and his monstrous transformation, makes zero sense. He is not, as Ebert posits, just a "woman in drag". He was a fleshed-out male character before they decided to turn him into a harmful stereotype, and that is not a baseless assumption; Ebert explains that, when asked about "the meaning of Z-Man's earlier scenes, in light of what is later discovered about the character," all he is able to say is that, "those earlier scenes were written before either Meyer or I knew Z-Man was a transvestite: that plot development came on the spur of the moment."

Evidently, Ebert thought socially transitioned men who live as their true selves are just unhinged women playing dress-up. That's the logic underpinning Barzell's characterisation. The filmmakers did not care how trans male viewers would be affected by a trans flasher character, evidently because their view of trans men was fundamentally bigoted.

From the very beginning of my transition, a primary accusation by transphobic and unsupportive people was that I was becoming ugly. People couldn't conceive of the idea that I would want to look and sound like a typical bloke. Even now, having been medically transitioned for years, one reason to avoid coming out as FTM is because a potential reaction is to denounce me as being nothing more than an ugly woman. Many trans men come up against this specific, horrible mentality, which is echoed by the labelling of Barzell as an "ugly broad". The comedy and horror of Barzell is solely focussed on the extent to which he has moved away from his assigned sex, cruelly mirroring what real trans men go through.

And, let's be clear, even before the film decides to be transphobic, it's blatantly homophobic. Lance, a cis straight man, isn't just the victim of a trans freak, he's also the victim of frequent gay advances. Barzell isn't just a trans bogeyman. He's a gay predator.

After decapitating Lance because he didn't consent to sex, Barzell hunts down and kills two lesbians by shooting them in the head. Roxanne, one of the women, is simply waiting to be killed in a manner so staged and fetishistic that it undoes all of her prior character development. Any effort to establish a meaningful lesbian relationship is literally blown away by the manner of her death. It's a nasty, yucky, undignified visual. Casey, the other lesbian woman, has already been raped and now loses her life.

What we end up with, ultimately, is a classic LGBT+ double whammy; Bury Your Gays plus the spooky threat of a trans pervert stalking and killing poor, helpless, feminine cis women. And the trans pervert, of course, is murdered. The cishet characters are left to enjoy their happy endings without any of the queerness which corrupted their storylines.

As Barzell lays dead, the horrified female protagonist stares at his body and bare, bloodied breasts. To the poor cishet characters, he is a freak and an abomination in death, defined by his trans body when he previously lived non-disclosing as a man. This is another classic trans trope, which mirrors the posthumous misgendering and othering of real people, including Billy Tipton and many forgotten trans men. This trope alone betrays the ignorance and carelessness of the filmmakers.

A trans man being played by a man (John LaZar) doesn't make this film any less awful. The message that this movie sends is that "women in drag" can deceive anybody by appearing flawlessly male. And, when the truth is discovered, such deceivers will become aggressive and unhinged, justifying any violence that cis people might preemptively dole out when they discover such a lie. This movie just... sucks.

A film having violence, confronting themes, or an aggressive trans character doesn’t automatically make it bad. What matters is how the film is written, what background the trans character has, and what their motivations are. As an example, consider Strange Circus (2005). It depicts almost every upsetting thing you can think of, but every scene is planned and clever, and any plot complexity or narrative confusion is deliberate. The trans man in that film is not the embodiment of an anti-trans trope. He is a strong, determined, furious survivor of sexual abuse, whose motivations are deeply explored before he is shown as a chainsaw-wielding killer. Strange Circus knows exactly what it is, and exactly who its characters are. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has no idea what it is. "You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance," snarls Barzell, before he hogties and kills his victim. Am I supposed to laugh? Really? How does a viewer even react to that weirdness? It's not scary, it's not funny, it's not clever, it's not compelling. It's nothing. Even given the grotesque violence, horrific themes, and obscene nudity in Strange Circus, it comes out victorious when compared to Ebert and Meyer's garbage.

Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend watching this one... unless you like trash. Which you might. In that case, go for it. (I know many people will disagree with my review of this supposed classic.) Regardless, definitely don't watch it for any kind of FTM representation. It's strange that Psycho (1960) is commonly accepted as having transphobic tropes, yet I rarely hear people admitting the same of this film, despite the fact that Barzell is canonically a perverse, violent, manipulative "broad" whose homicidal actions are directly tied to his increasingly unpredictable gender non-conformity and canon trans identity.

Beyond the anti-FTM transphobia in this film, other minorities are depicted with apathy or outright ignorance toward the harmful messages being reinforced.

The rockstars' White manager, Harris, rapes Casey (one of the lesbians ultimately murdered by Barzell) and is absolved with a dreamy, meditative concluding narration. By contrast, Randy Black, a Black heavyweight boxer, gets the following concluding narration: "Randy's body: A cage for an animal. It lifted him to the top of his field, but in the end, the beast almost killed him." Randy's whole role in the film is to be overcome by sexual and violent urges, embodying the racist stereotype of an uncontrollable, sexually aggressive Black man. He is defined exclusively by his violent body and by his hostility, and a woman has to arm herself with a weapon to force him to leave her home. The fact that he is a felon and compared to an animal is the cherry on top of the shit cake, echoing a horrid history of Black criminal defendants being compared to animals. This characterisation isn't clever or subversive, it's just lazy. Satire is typically used to make some kind of point about whatever is being satirised but, in this film, the butt of the joke is minorities themselves.

Ebert had the utter gall to call Beyond the Valley of the Dolls "an essay on our generic expectations... a wind-up machine to generate emotions, pure movie without message." The trouble is that this movie does actually offer plenty of messages, racist and transphobic and lesbophobic and misogynistic in nature, but the filmmakers were either uncaring or unable to realise those themes, too absorbed in a blatantly egotistical filmmaking process.

Oh, also, a bloke randomly dresses as a Nazi, complete with the salute and the uniform, for no reason at all. You could grope around to try and find one, but that would be poor justification after the fact. As Ebert bragged, apparently viewing these qualities as positives, this film is nothing but "an anthology of stock situations, characters, dialogue, clichés and stereotypes".

"It begins rather slowly, because so many characters have to be established and such an ungainly plot has to be set in motion," he also said, "The story is such a labyrinthine juggling act that resolving it took a quadruple murder, a narrative summary, a triple wedding, and an epilogue." That sounds rather like the type of disorganised, unrestrained, poorly-written movie that Ebert would have panned as a reviewer.

GENERAL WARNINGS:

Infidelity, traumatic abortion, and other themes are handled with all of the grace and subtlety that the rest of the film wields. There is drug and alcohol use/abuse. Naked women are used as props, courtesy of the film's satirical sexploitation schtick. Homophobic slurs are repeatedly used, and little people are referred to with a term which is widely considered a slur nowadays.